The Quiet Work of Coming Back to Yourself

No one teaches you how to come back to yourself. We talk plenty about burnout, rock bottom, trauma, even transformation. We have TED Talks on resilience, habit tracking apps, and guided meditations for emotional regulation. But what about the slow, inarticulate process of simply just being okay again?

There’s an expectation that the return has to be glorious. We want to be able to reach a point where we can say, “look at me now.” But most returns aren’t cinematic, and they certainly don’t happen overnight. Most people don’t wake up to a thunderclap of clarity or suddenly start drinking celery juice and doing sunrise yoga. Most people come back slowly, clumsily, and in pieces. And that still counts.

The quiet work of coming back to yourself doesn’t announce itself. It often starts with absence: the absence of panic, or avoidance, or the compulsions you used to rely on. You start listening to music again. You begin to notice the warmth of the sun on your skin again. You start remembering to take care of yourself – and not because other people tell you to, but because you want to. These are not breakthroughs. They’re more like reintroductions to the parts of you that never fully left.

In psychological terms, this slow emergence from dissociation or burnout is often described as “re-integration”. According to trauma researcher Dr. Janina Fisher, the process of healing involves not just the reduction of symptoms, but the reconnection to selfhood — a felt sense of “I am here, and I matter” (Fisher, 2017). But culturally, we’re not taught to notice that kind of progress. We’re taught to wait for a dramatic ending — or at least a highly shareable one.

There’s a reason people find it easier to talk about collapse than about recovery. Collapse is loud. It demands attention. Recovery, on the other hand, is quiet. It can take years. It happens while you’re brushing your teeth or deleting someone’s number without needing to text them first. It’s boring, repetitive, and deeply unsexy. And it can be really hard to start climbing towards.

But that’s where the real work happens: not in the breakdown, but in the repetition of small, healthy choices that are often unnoticeable to the outside world. In showing up to appointments, and not canceling plans. In walking home or taking the bus instead of taking a ride-share. In getting enough sleep. In going for a walk instead of doomscrolling. In making a real dinner at home instead of just ordering delivery again.

Writer and philosopher Jenny Odell, in her book ‘How to Do Nothing’, describes this kind of slow return to presence as “the labor of attention.” She writes, “To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated. It’s to know how to see and be seen on your own terms.” Coming back to yourself is not a race to become “better” — it’s a reclamation of how you want to see, feel, and be.

But it’s complicated. The culture we live in doesn’t exactly reward slowing down or softening. Capitalism favors productivity over presence. Even healing has been commodified – marketed to us through apps, supplements, retreat packages, and curated aesthetics. Emotional clarity has become aspirational. And so, ironically, we try to rush our way into inner peace.

But true inner peace is inconvenient. It asks you to sit still when you want to run. It asks you to feel things instead of fix them. It doesn’t look like “having your life together.” Often, it looks like someone who’s starting over quietly, again and again, without telling anyone.

Coming back to yourself also means confronting who you’ve been while you were gone. The things you ignored. The people you hurt. The mess you left in the rooms you were trying to escape. This is why a lot of people resist it — not because they don’t want to feel better, but because they don’t want to take accountability.

As psychotherapist Francis Weller writes, “Healing is not about recovery but about discovery. It is not a return to a prior state, but rather the integration of all the pieces of ourselves we left behind” (The Wild Edge of Sorrow, 2015).

There is grief in that. There’s a reason it’s called a return. You are returning to the body, to sensation, to memory, to loss. You are remembering what it means to have a self, which is not the same as liking that self. But presence comes first. Love, maybe, later.

This process isn’t always a choice. Sometimes it’s forced – maybe you get sober. Maybe someone leaves. Maybe something breaks that can’t be repaired, and you’re left sitting in the quiet. And once you’re there, you start to realize that being present doesn’t always mean being happy. It just means being with yourself again, in whatever condition you’re in.

The return is never linear. Some days you’ll want to disappear again. Some days, you’ll romanticize your worst coping mechanisms. Some days, you’ll feel like you’ve regressed. That’s normal. The work of coming back is cyclical. You arrive. You drift. You return again.

And maybe that’s what this is really about — not some final destination of selfhood, but a lifelong process of re-approaching yourself. Of noticing when you’ve gone quiet again, and choosing to say, gently, “come back.”

No one teaches you how to do that. But once you start, you realize you already know how.